Event recording – Making sense of coronavirus data with your learners
'Making sense of coronavirus data with your learners' took place on 9th December 2020.
Event recording – Physical Fitness and the Pandemic: what the data can tell your learners
Physical Fitness and the Pandemic: what the data can tell your learners took place on 14th December 2020 and explores what data tells us about the importance of physical activity for learners during the pandemic.
New project: National Progression Award in Cyber Security and Data Science
This project, funded by Skills Development Scotland, will undertake a feasibility study to understand if the school computing science curriculum can be delivered online effectively and sustainably with a focus on National Progression Awards in Cyber Security & Data Science.
New project: NPA/PDA resource development
This DataLab funded project will work with Effini to deliver a set of training materials around the learning outcomes of two national qualifications, the National Progression Award (NPA) in Data Science and the Professional Development Award (PDA) in Data Science. They will be designed to support online, in person, and self-directed learning that is short-term, flexible and modularised.
New project: Mapping NCCE computing material to the Scottish curriculum
The aim of this Skills Development Scotland funded project is to process the Key Stage 1- 4 curriculum materials developed by the National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE) from the Teach Computing website and the accompanying NCCE video lessons to tag them with the relevant Scottish curriculum outcomes where appropriate.
Digital and Data Literacy
Digital and data literacy: Comparing children’s understanding of data and online privacy with experts’ and advocates’ data literacy practices. If you missed Dr Gianfranco Polizzi, Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham, speaking on the 20th January, you can now catch up with the seminar recording.
Data Skills Live: where computer science meets theatre
On 4th Nov we ran our first Data Skills Live Lesson where 350 learners came together from 15 Scottish local authorities to defend the rhino and learn some new data skills in the process.
New project: Designing conversational assistants to reduce gender bias
Recently, biased machine learning has received increased attention. This project will address a different type of bias which is not learnt from data, but encoded during the design process. We illustrate this problem on the example of Conversational Assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, or Google's Assistant, which are predominately modelled as young, submissive women. According to UNESCO, this bears the risk of reinforcing gender stereotypes. In this project, we will explore this claim via psychological studies on how conversational gendering (expressed through voice, content and style) influences human behaviour in both online and offline interactions. Based on the insights gained, we will establish a principled framework for designing and developing alternative conversational personas which are less likely to perpetuate bias. A persona can be viewed as a composite of elements of identity (background facts or user profile), language behaviour, and interaction style. This framework will include state-of-the-art data-efficient NLP deep learning tools for generating dialogue responses which are consistent with a given persona. The persona parameters can be specified by non-expert users in order to to facilitate more inclusive design, as well as to enable a wider critical discussion.